In the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) project, an Access Network Discovery Selection Function (ANDSF) is described. The ANDSF server, defined as a part of the System Architecture Evolution (SAE) within the standards bodies (3GPP TS 23.402), provides user equipments (UEs) with policies and access network selection information within a 3GPP access network. The UE can query the ANDSF for information about other non-3GPP access networks. Specifically, the standards documentation states, “It contains data management and control functionality necessary to provision network discovery and selection assistance data as per operators' policy. The ANDSF is able to initiate data transfer to the UE, based on network triggers, and respond to requests from the UE.” (3GPP TS 23.402, section 4.8.2.1).
As depicted in FIG. 1, the ANDSF server 110 includes a reference point S14 to provide the UE 120 with access network selection policies and/or discovery hints. The UE 120 can use the information provided on the S14 interface to determine which access network to scan for and also to determine the operator policies with regard to a handover. The UE 120 can decide to stay on the 3GPP access network or to perform a handover to a non-3GPP access network. Thus, the 3GPP standard describes that the ANDSF provides the non-3GPP access network selection information.
However, the standard does not describe how the information is collected and maintained. Rather, it is assumed that topology data are manually provisioned. It is tedious to manually provision and maintain relationships between every cell of a 3GPP access network (GSM, WCDMA, E-UTRAN, LTE, etc.) and surrounding non-3GPP cells. In addition, the manual process is error prone.